WALLIS AJ the forms and that without addresses it was impossible to verify the existence of particular voters or their right to be registered in a particular ward. Furthermore, some of the addresses on the forms were confusing because they merely showed the voter to be resident in a named informal settlement, the boundaries of which spanned more than one ward. The result, so he said, was that voters from wards 17 and 21 were registered in ward 13. He complained that, in the ward he had contested in September, there were 612 registration forms bearing addresses that did not fall within the boundaries of the ward. [13] The founding affidavit culminated with the following statement: “It is impossible for the applicants to accurately reflect the irregularities in respect of each ward, given the limited time, resources and manpower. As such the relevant bundles dealing with ward 13, ward 19 and ward 20 constitute clear evidence of the irregularities. A sampled result in all the other wards suggests the same pattern. I state without hesitation that the investigation envisaged in the Notice of Motion will reveal the fatally flawed process in the wards not covered by the clear evidence referred to herein.” [14] After the December by-elections, and in response to the present litigation, the IEC conducted its own investigation into the allegations that voters not entitled to registration in these wards had been registered and that their participation had affected the result of the by-elections. It concluded that there were a number of such registrations and that some of those voters had voted, but that in no case had they done so in sufficient numbers to affect the result of the elections.15 Its stance was, and in this Court is, that this meant that the result of the by-elections could not be disturbed. It accepted that the relevant segments of the voters’ roll were only distributed on 4 December 2013 and that all the parties involved in the election had complained of 15 The adjusted margins of victory taking into account the voters identified as not being entitled to registration in these wards fluctuated. In ward 4 if their votes were discounted and deducted from the total of the winning candidate the victory margin shrank to three, but, even if it extinguished the victory margin entirely, that would not have helped the fourth applicant, Ms Johanna Shona Xaba, who came third. It might have assisted the runner-up from another party. 8